Game:

Soma (2015)

Duration: 2:18:55

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8

Right at the moment when I played Soma for the first time, I thought that it's great that it has content for apartment, city, outdoor terrains and expected a mod that makes use of these things to appear.

The story starts nicely when the hero wakes up at home, and we learn what's going on through reading e-mails and receiving phone calls. There's excellent voice acting. The design looks good and believable, with well placed lights producing great shadows. There's something wrong with the setup of shadows themselves, though: they look pixelated.

Scare event is thoughtfully placed at the time you least expect it.

Then, eventually, outdoor location. There are some problems with it. It lacks smoothing, there are many sharp corners around, making the ground look unrealistic. Apparent texel density issue shows itself: texture of the ground looks very blurry in comparison with stones that lie on it. At 13:10 and 15:53 these stones seem to hang in the air. Scale of texture on a cliff at 19:43 is too low, opening the way for unrealistic repetition of it.

Other than that, it looks good, with nice variety of heights, plants and lighting brightness. Red flowers around the lake is a unique and memorable landmark that helps finding the way and understanding where you are.

The underground base looks convincing and fresh. Even more impressive is the fact that apparently it's made using only the static meshes that come with the game, or at least I didn't find any new meshes in the mod's folder, besides the medkit.

Each part of the location is different from the other, making the place memorable and easy to find your way through.

Brown metal girders are an excellent way to provide visual accents, pipes are placed along the walls in a way that gives feeling of perspective. You look at the wall - you see foreground (pipes) and background (wall). You look down the corridor - you see converging lines that the pipes form.

Underwater segments where you have lower gravity and limited time before health starts depleting are a nice original idea, but also confusing. You hear breathing sounds as if you wear some kind of helmet, but I don't recall picking one up before. And it looks like you're not supposed to go there until you found that helmet or the water's gone, which made me believe that I'm supposed to use the valves in the other section to drain the water first, then made me feel surprised when it was still there.

Removing a monster from the room when it's completed is a great idea. Gameplay around monsters in Soma not fun, especially in small areas with not enough space to run, and minimizing their presence is appreciated.

23:40 - it looks like if you jump across, the floor collapses when you're in the air. It should only collapse when you touch it. The height of fall doesn't look like something possible to survive without serious injury since the water isn't deep and I didn't notice any soft surface on the place you fall to.

24:51 - these rocks look like they've been assigned a texture that isn't meant for them.

29:52 - climbing to the door is a lot harder than it should be. Another example of place that can be confusing. It's easy to think that it's impossible to climb here at all. While I had fun figuring out how to climb it: get on the rock nearby, start running, jump, tap "backward" button five times, start running, jump forward; from a game design point of view it's a too complicated scheme for action as simple as climbing to the door. And it's not so fun later when a monster is very close. It was a miracle I somehow could survive this on a first attempt.

When watching the video after playing, it seems like I was supposed to pick up the grate at 30:37 and place it to make going up there easy, but since I could already do it anyway, I didn't realise its purpose.

Usually such problems are fixed by placing similar thing with grate lying nearby to teach the player that it can be placed to serve as a ramp.

The computer with command prompt is a nice idea, and the sudden need to quickly close the door with it

32:10 - here the feel of novelty and unique environment disappears, because walls from early build of Soma are recognized. They look great, but we've seen them before.

54:30 - are these crates meant to hide in them? No? Too bad...

1:04:45 - it's also hard to realse that this lever is what you need to pull because it looks the same as the one in the room we're told not to pull.

1:05:44 - excellent lighting, where shadows not only serve as a decoration, but also show location of the monster.

1:53:30 - since it's impossible to squeeze through the pipes to the left and to the right, you have to run very close to the monster, which turns the event into unpleasant lottery where you just have to try again and again until you get lucky. Also, missing valve gives false impression that you're supposed to find it.

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